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Perhaps you expect your DVD and CD collection to be made 'obsolete' by the arrival of HD-DVD/Bluray and SACD/DVD-A? Well you'd be wrong because those formats aren't even going to get out of the starting blocks because DVD and CD will be the last successful physical formats. Music and films will merely be downloaded onto a central device and replayed from there.
Big words and big claims, but they're not ours, rather they are the thoughts of that biggest of big wigs, Mr Bill Gates. Clearly putting all of his faith in his Media Center vision, Gates sees a future of downloaded content and a supplementary vision of streamed content. He believes traditional broadcast will die and be replaced by internet-based high speed, high definition streaming.
This could allow for far greater autonomy on the part of the viewer. For example, suppose you are a football fan and you have a 12-minute window in which to watch the highlights of the day's action, then you would be able to download clips instantly edited to 12 minutes in length. The PC will shift its current perception as a work-based tool to that of an entertainment powerhouse which is also able to process word and other documents.
The Media Center edition of windows has been available for some time now and the potential of it has always been something we've admired. However, there have always been restrictions on that admiration due to one or two big issues. Firstly, legal film downloads are still a very thorny issue - so do these comments from Bill Gates point towards the launch of such a service?
Secondly there is the issue of compression. All current music downloads are compressed and it can be reasonably assumed that any future film service will be similarly packaged. Until our Media Centers' hard drives are well over the one terabyte size and our internet connections are consdiderably faster than they are at present, lossless audio and video is not a viable possibility.
Will lower quality and convenience win out over high-end physical formats? Bill Gates seems to think so and judging by what's happening in the music market, he could just be on to something…
That's what Bill Gates thinks but what do YOU think? Tell us in the forums.
